Miguel de Icaza: "To sum up: (a) First dimension: things change too quickly, breaking both open source and proprietary software alike; (b) incompatibility across Linux distributions. This killed the ecosystem for third party developers trying to target Linux on the desktop. You would try once, do your best effort to support the 'top' distro or if you were feeling generous 'the top three' distros. Only to find out that your software no longer worked six months later. Supporting Linux on the desktop became a burden for independent developers." Mac OS X came along to scoop up the Linux defectors.

And on my distro the repo (extra) is enabled by default, no editing necessary.

And as you say it probably works the same way in another distro ... BUT NOT THE SAME WAY.

Well, naturally there can be differences between distros, they are essentially different operating systems sharing components, Linux is just the kernel. But I don't have to give a crap about how it works on 'other distros' anymore than I have to care about how it works on Windows or OSX, I only have to learn how it works on my distro and it sure isn't hard.

And furthermore, once you've learned to use a package manager it gets infinately more easy to manage your installed software than through separate uninstallers like on Windows, each with a tendency to leave crap behind leading to the well-known 'ever growing' Windows partition problem.

Even if you took all of the different way you normally would install these on Windows, it is still walking through an Installer Wizard.

Learning to click through a installer, using Ubuntu's app installation gui or using pacman -S or apt-get or OSX's method of either application bundles or installers are really no harder than the other in practice.

You learn it in 5 minutes or less. I don't get why you try to paint this as some major hurdle, I'm guessing you have fallen off that bike of yours one time too many.

Lets forget depending on the media player and whether your audio backend you might have to install different packages.

I'm not following this at all.

I can't be arsed with this shit half the time, and I am an OpenBSD user. If anyone else had to do this they would say "this is a bit shit isn't it".

Who is 'anyone else', certainly not me and certainly not the Linux users out there. I get it, it's too hard for you, but no one is forcing you to use it.

Lets compare it to Windows

In Windows:

* Download Klite Codec Pack, VLC, iTunes or any other popular media player
* Install.